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What Would We Do Without Experts? 
“Cornell Maya Expert: World Probably Won’t End Dec. 21”–headline, Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal, Dec. 10

Scalia the Incomprehensible 
You have to give Justice Scalia this: He has a talent for confusing feminists. The Associated Press reports from Princeton, where he took questions from students after a talk yesterday:

Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder. . . .

“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the `reduction to the absurd,’ ” Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

Then he deadpanned: “I’m surprised you aren’t persuaded.”

Slate blogress Amanda Marcotte sallies back: “That would be because boldly stating stuff without really bothering to make an argument for it isn’t persuasive, something you’d have thought Scalia’s law professors would have taught him.”

So not only does Marcotte fail to understand the reductio ad absurdum, she isn’t even familiar with the rhetorical device known as sarcasm.

NOTE:  The excerpts above are from the Dec. 11 BOTW archives.